Reba: My Story (4 page)

J
ACK PALANCE WON AN OSCAR FOR HIS PERFORMANCE AS A
hardened old trail guide in
City Slickers
, the popular 1991 movie that also starred Billy Crystal. Crystal was one of three city folks who hoped that by wearing diamonds and denim in the country and chasing cattle for a week they’d find their “smiles,” or their manhood.

I knew a lot of working cowboys when I was growing up, and most of them, I think, would enjoy the undeniable humor of that movie. But none of them, especially me, would think that working on a real cattle ranch gives you a lot to smile over.

One of the most frequent questions I was asked when my career began to take hold was whether or not I was a real cowgirl. Some folks thought that I learned to ride a horse in college just to compete in rodeos. The fact is, I rode horses about fifteen years before I ever went to college, and it wasn’t for the fun of competition. It was because
my Daddy said, “Get on him, get in the brush, and find some cattle.”

There was a time when my Daddy, Clark McEntire, us kids, Grandpap, and a ranch hand took care of 3,000 head of cattle by ourselves from morning till night, then would come in and “doctor” 200 head. No, ranching is not an easy life—and while it’s a little softer, a performer’s life can be hard too. My friend Clark Rhyne, who was my history and art teacher at school, likes to say that my toughness was instilled in me by my Daddy and the life we all shared on the ranch.

T
HE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO MY DADDY WAS MY
Mama! They had known each other since they were young. Daddy remembers the first time he saw Mama, because he associates her with a yearling her Daddy was hauling to Oklahoma City. “I thought she was a great big ole kid,” he jokes, “four or five years older than me.”

Mama, in fact, is older by only one year and twenty-four days.

Mama can’t recall when she first saw Daddy. “He was just a little fat kid who was always around,” she says. But she does remember one day in the ninth grade, when he came to school in khaki britches and a khaki shirt. Then, three weeks into the term, Daddy disappeared—he had quit school forever. I think he got intimidated by high school because he had been sick in first grade and missed learning how to read. But what he lacks in reading, he makes up for with a natural gift for figures, although Daddy would say he got his education in the roping pen.

Somehow, they got together, but they’ve forgotten their first date. “We didn’t date much back then,” Mama says. “There was a little country church about a mile and a half from my house. The girls walked and the boys mostly had horses. And the boys would ride up to the girls and get
off their horses and walk beside them. If the girl didn’t jerk away, well, that was a date.”

Eventually they started going to church services or to picture shows together. Mama couldn’t get enough of Clark Gable, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Stanwyck, and those other movie stars of the 1940s. “And I hated picture shows,” Daddy says. “I had to sit through them just to see her.”

To see Daddy, Mama had to ride her horse for one and a half miles to the state highway, where she would tie the horse to a tree and loosen the girth, then flag down the Greyhound bus to Atoka for the movie. When the show ended, she would retrace her tracks and retrieve her horse from the tree.

They sure must have liked each other.

Still, their courtship lasted five or six years, depending on which parent you ask. After a while, Mama was looking for a marriage proposal, but Daddy stayed silent on the subject. “It’s hard to take on a wife when you didn’t have anything but a lariat rope and a horse and gone off rodeoing all the time,” Daddy explains.

Finally, Mama’s determination beat out her patience and she took matters into her own hands: “I asked him,” she says.

They married on March 17, 1950, when he was twenty-two and she was twenty-three. Daddy’s brother-in-law had married four or five years before and had suggested they use the same preacher, saying, “He’ll charge you, oh, two or three dollars to marry you,” Daddy recalls. Well, Daddy brought a twenty-dollar bill, his entire net worth, and gave it to the preacher, expecting change. The minister merely said, “Thank you.” Daddy never had much use for preachers after that.

Mama bought her own wedding ring for twenty-seven dollars after making a three-dollar down payment. Daddy put it on her finger, and for forty-four years, it has never been removed.

They made their home in what they called the “Til
House,” just down the road from Grandpap and Grandma Alice. It was a two-room shack with a wooden floor but no running water and no electricity. On the door frame, you could still see where the previous owners had allowed their hogs to go in and out, rubbing up against the frame.

“But Clark’s mother, Alice, thought we could make it livable and real cute,” recalls Mama, “so we got us some lye and made us some lye water and scrubbed the place down. Then we got some building paper and we papered down the walls and it looked pretty good. At least it was clean.”

Mama kept on teaching school while Daddy pursued his rodeoing. She had been working since she was seventeen years old, teaching grades one through eight in a one-room schoolhouse at Tipporary. In the summer she would ride the Greyhound bus down to Durant, about fifty miles, to take classes at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. That’s one of the reasons why, years later, I chose that college.

Then Daddy won a car in a roping competition and he told Mama to ask her brother Dale if he’d be willing to swap the car for his eighty acres down on Boggy Creek. Dale said yes, and it was a done deal.

Mama stopped teaching after my oldest sister was born in 1951. She was named Alice after my Grandma Alice, who died in 1950. Mama also had to stop attending rodeos then with Daddy because he simply didn’t want her along. Daddy preferred to go with other cowboys, usually his friend Hugh Posey, so they could split expenses. She was so mad about that, she once threw a hammer at Daddy. She missed, luckily.

One day when Daddy and Hugh were preparing to take off, Mama and Alice snuck into the camper in the bed of the pickup. When he discovered the two of them, Daddy refused to speak to Mama for the entire trip.

On one trip, Daddy suffered a terrible tragedy. Few things are more important to a rodeo cowboy than his
trained horse, and Ole Joe was the best steer-roping horse Daddy ever had. His winning momentum was up on that horse, and he expected to ride him all the way to the world championship.

Daddy, Hugh Posey, and another friend, Max Kinyon, were going to a rodeo at Strong City, Kansas. Max wanted to ride Ole Joe, so he tied him to the back of their camper. Ole Joe was real bad about rearin’ back and trying to break loose when you tried to saddle him. As he ran backwards, Ole Joe yanked out the piece of angle iron that he was tied up to. He ran into a fence and fell back on the angle iron, which stabbed him in the stomach.

Daddy took Ole Joe to Manhattan, Kansas, where veterinarians tried to put the animal’s intestines back in place. Daddy was sitting on Ole Joe’s head to hold him down while they anesthetized him. But the man who administered the anesthetic was a student and gave the horse too much. Daddy heard the vet say, “Go easy on that stuff. He’s weak.” After the shot, Daddy said, “Hell, fellers, he’s already dead.” Ole Joe died of a drug overdose.

That horse wouldn’t have been for sale at any price, Daddy has always said. When he lost his Ole Joe, Daddy became a changed man. Mama says he seemed to withdraw and lost a lot of his spirit.

Two years later, when my brother was born, Daddy had to leave to go rodeoing. It was a hard time for Mama—a lot of folks say there isn’t a time more sad for a woman than right after childbirth. Postnatal depression, doctors call it. But Daddy had to try to bring home the money that would sustain his family, so Mama had to be understanding.

Daddy left right after bringing Mama home from the hospital with my newborn brother Pake, taking the only automobile they had. Since she had no car and no telephone, Mama would tell our mailman, Bob Weaver, if she needed help, who then, when he delivered her mail, would inform Grandma Smith to come get them.

Daddy got back home a few months later, and just as
soon as he got into the house, he wanted to know where Pake was.

“He’s on the couch,” Mama said. “You walked right past him.”

“That’s not Pake, that’s Alice,” Daddy said.

Pake had grown so much that Daddy hadn’t recognized him. He had to check a birthmark on Pake’s left knee to be sure. Clearly, Daddy had been away too long.

I
WAS BORN ON MARCH 28, 1955. MAMA HAD A ROUGHER TIME
with me than with any of the others, because I was a breech baby. As it happened, that was the only year my folks were without health insurance, and so, as Daddy likes to tell it, he had to sell some hogs to pay for me!

Not long after Mama and Daddy brought me home, Oklahoma City took their Boggy Creek property to be the floodplain for a new lake, later to be called Atoka Lake. So Daddy and Mama bought 100 acres on the east side of Highway 69, south of Limestone Gap, about two miles south of where Daddy had grown up and five from where Mama was raised. By the time they brought my sister Susie home from the hospital, Daddy had a three-bedroom house roughed in enough for us to live in.

Susie’s birth meant that Mama now had four kids under the age of six. But by then she was an expert at coping during Daddy’s absences. One of the times when Daddy was gone, I can recall Mama down at the pond chopping ice so the cattle and horses could get something to drink. She fixed water pumps, stoves, rigs, and washed clothes outside on a wringer washing machine. Her abilities were a balance for Daddy’s—he can do almost anything he makes his mind up to do, and do it right, except be a mechanic. “If it can’t be fixed with baling wire, it can’t be fixed,” he always says. He once tore his shirt and tried to mend it by pouring maple syrup over the tear and putting an encyclopedia on top of it.

Baling wire would have worked better!

We had fun, Mama and us kids. She’d play with us and then tell us to go out and play, because she had work to do. But she played with us first. We sang at the supper table, told jokes, and swapped stories about things that happened during the day. We didn’t do that when Daddy was home. It got on his nerves. The only time I knew Mama would rather be alone than with us kids was when she was reading a good book. The best thing to do then was to get a book and lie on the bed with her.

Mama stayed home till Alice was old enough to take care of us, then she went back to work, selling fish bait down at Atoka Lake. I remember how she went to and from work in an old pickup that had no brakes or starter. It was the best we could afford.

Mama would park the pickup on a hill at night and scotch it with a rock under a tire, then in the morning us kids would push it down the slope so she could pop the clutch and force-start the engine. She parked it on a hill at work as well and had to pop the clutch to drive home. Sometimes, she went in before daylight and came home after dark. That’s when fishermen want bait.

She earned six dollars a day, and the priceless respect of children who never heard her complain.

I learned from Mama that a child wants and needs to know who the boss is and that the boss has to be consistent, loving but firm. That was Mama. If I can be half as good a Mama as my Mama, I’ll be thrilled.

People ask me what I would change about my life. And I’ve thought about it and usually say “nothing.” But I would change one thing: every time I ever made Mama cry. That breaks my heart, that I ever disappointed her enough to make her cry.